Rendering Weirdness

Hi,

I apologize if this is covered somewhere else. I've looked, but haven't found anything. Plus, I have no idea how to distill my problem into a few keywords :)

So I'm working on a project, using a couple of reverb returns and then using NI Absynth set to audio in to use the LFO section on the reverbs. I'm also using a similar setup on a vocal track to get an effect I want.

Here's the problem that I'm having...whatever is rendering is not what I'm hearing on those tracks using Absynth as an effect. When I first open the project, play the song, set my levels it sounds fine. When I render the file, the returns are several dB louder than they were while playing directly from Ableton. If I then go back to Ableton and play the song, now the returns match the rendered file. If I close and repeat the process, same results. I'm rendering to 32 bit (as I had seen in another thread), no dithering (obviously :) ).

Here's another weirdness. Yesterday morning I rendered my file, but was running late for work, so I just left my computer running to render. I came back to it this morning, same project still loaded from yesterday and rendered again. Sounded similar to yesterday's render, but when I pulled both files into Reaper, flipped the phase, I heard quite a bit of information...all side information.

Does anyone have any ideas of what's going on here? I'm at a loss. I hope I've explained my problem well enough. I'm sure the problem is just me being daft, but for the life of me I can't figure it out and it's driving me batty!